My understanding of average vs total utilitarianism doesn’t yet tell me which one to vote for. You could ask me to vote anyway, but is there a reason why voting would give high quality answers to such questions?
We are talking about a hypothetical vote here, where we could glean people’s underlying preferences. Not what people think they want (people get that wrong all the time) but their actual utility function. This leaves us with three options:
1) You do not actually care about how we aggregate utility, this would result in an ambivalence score of 0
2) You do have an underlying preference that you just don’t know consciously, this means your underlying preference gets counted.
3) You do care about how we aggregate utility, but aren’t inherently in favor of either average or total. So when we gauge your ambivalence we see that you do care (1 or something high), but you really like both average (e.g 0,9) and total (e.g 0,9) with other methods like median and mode getting something low (like e.g 0,1)
In all cases the system works to accommodate your underlying preferences.
My understanding of average vs total utilitarianism doesn’t yet tell me which one to vote for. You could ask me to vote anyway, but is there a reason why voting would give high quality answers to such questions?
We are talking about a hypothetical vote here, where we could glean people’s underlying preferences. Not what people think they want (people get that wrong all the time) but their actual utility function. This leaves us with three options:
1) You do not actually care about how we aggregate utility, this would result in an ambivalence score of 0
2) You do have an underlying preference that you just don’t know consciously, this means your underlying preference gets counted.
3) You do care about how we aggregate utility, but aren’t inherently in favor of either average or total. So when we gauge your ambivalence we see that you do care (1 or something high), but you really like both average (e.g 0,9) and total (e.g 0,9) with other methods like median and mode getting something low (like e.g 0,1)
In all cases the system works to accommodate your underlying preferences.